Abstract

The term ‘’archive’’ has multiple definitions and can be used to refer to memory and knowledge, and to the institutions under whose regime memory and knowledge is guarded. Archives are always involved in processes of selection, suppression, exclusion, and erasure, but are also vehicles for preservation. In this guest lecture, Professor Ernst van Alphen will discuss the work of the French photographer Mathieu Pernot and the German photographer August Sander. Sander’s archival images tend to reduce human subjects to a type, and in this way, he develops an instrumental and encyclopedic approach to humanity. Pernot’s images, on the other hand, rewrites the archival genre and he intervenes in archival practices by enabling the viewer to see in these images’ real individuals with stories and memories.

Landmark exhibitions such as Edward Steichen’s 1955 Family of Man have suggested a unified mode of behavior of the human, while other photographic exhibitions have tended to rely on taxonomies of classification, particularly through emphasizing physical characteristics of the photographed subject, such as Diane Arbus work in the early 1970’s. In this guest lecture we are invited to re-think the archival image as an emancipatory sensible system, which can open a space to think of the human outside of these categories.

Speaker

Ernst van Alphen is a professor emeritus of Literary Studies at the Leiden University Center for Arts and Society. He is particularly interested in issues that are central to in modern and post-modern literature and in the relation between literature and visual arts.

His books include Failed Images (Valiz, 2018), Staging the Archive: Art and Photography in Times of New Media (Reaktion Books, 2014) and Caught by History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature and Theory (Stanford CA, 1997). Soon will appear Seven Logics of Sculpture. Encountering Objects Through the Senses (Valiz 2022), and: Productive Archiving: Artistic Strategies, Future Memories & Fluid Identities (Valiz 2023).

Convenors

• Ermelinda Xheza